Category Archives: Non-Fiction

The Dictator’s Last Night: Yasmina Khadra, translated by Julian Evans

01 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Books in translation, Current Affairs / Politics / Society, Fiction

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On 20 October 2011, the news was full of the capture of the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, found hiding in a culvert in near Sirte. It was an unimaginable fall for the man who saw himself as the saviour of his people who, in turn, loved him. Outside Libya, he was known for possessing a sense of theatre, and for being one of the very few—if not the only—heads of state who had women bodyguards. But he was also a ruthless dictator who destroyed any individual who opposed him, or whom he perceived as being a threat.

With this book, Yasmina Khadra takes us into the mind of Gaddafi during his last night. It is a tour de force—although The Dictator’s Last Night is a fictionalized account, it feels very real. We know that the events narrated actually happened, but it is the glimpse into the dictator’s mind that is fascinating. It’s a short book at 180 pages, but Khadra tells you what you need to know, and quite frankly, I did not want to be in Gaddafi’s head for longer than that.

As the book begins, Gaddafi and his men have had to flee Tripoli and are hiding out in a disused school in Sirte. For the next few hours, he reminisces, rails at the Libyan people for betraying him and worries about his sons who are battling the rebels. He is a contradictory mix of supreme self-confidence with a hunger for approval, of sentimentality and brutality. When his security chief, Mansour Dhao, says he wants to resign so he can spend his time praying for forgiveness for his acts of injustice and cruelty, Gaddafi takes it as a personal attack. (After all, Dhao was acting on his orders.) “Do you think I was unjust or cruel to my people?”, he asks. Dhao’s only response is “Only God is infallible”. Gaddafi can barely contain his rage at this equivocation. He is, after all, “an exceptional being, providence incarnate, envied by the gods, able to make a faith of his cause”.

Khadra uses the journey into Gaddafi’s past to try to understand the circumstances that shaped him. Growing up as a poor and fatherless Bedouin, he managed to get ahead and join the army, even going to Sandhurst in the UK after military training. But that wasn’t enough: as far as the establishment was concerned, he would never be one of them. Not a man to ever forget or forgive a slight, he carried out his own vengeance once he took power.

There are some interesting touches. Gaddafi has recurring nightmares before something life-changing happens, and these nightmares always involve Van Gogh as he appears in his self-portrait with a bandaged ear. He is visited by Van Gogh on his last night, the end of which would see him and his men flee the school and be ambushed by rebels. But true to himself until the end, Gaddafi sees himself not as a hunted man but as a Christ-like figure. As the mob descends on him, he calls out “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do”.

This is a haunting book, beautifully and vividly written. Khadra is a well-known Algerian writer. This is the first book I have read by him, and I was completely absorbed in his world.

A final note: I read the book in French (La Dernière Nuit du Raïs), so the quotes are my translations, except for “an exceptional being…”, which was taken from the extracts of the English translation on Amazon UK.

Meena Kumari: Vinod Mehta

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Media / Film / Music, Non-Fiction

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For many years, I’ve enjoyed the writing of Vinod Mehta, the editor of the Indian newsmagazine Outlook, so I was looking forward to reading his biography of Meena Kumari, an iconic Indian actress who died in 1972. But the biography was written on a commission soon after her death, when Mehta was a young man. And it is very much a young man’s book—cocky and self-assured—which is a pity. If he had written it in the last ten years, it would have been a more thoughtful work.

In an introduction to this recent edition, Mehta admits to this. He had been influenced by Norman Mailer’s style of writing, which was to insert the author into the text. You can never really forget that Mehta is writing this book, which means you cannot really lose yourself in it. I wish he had edited it and ironed out some of the annoying tics, such as the constant references to “my heroine”.

However, the story itself has enough weight to carry it through. For those unfamiliar with Meena Kumari, she was a well-known actress who worked in Hindi films from 1939 (as a child actress) until her death. She was known for playing tragic roles, including in one of my favourite films, Pakeezah, to which Mehta devotes an entire chapter. She was prolific and very talented, so much so that in 1963, she got all three nominations for the Filmfare Best Actress award!

Before I go any further, let me clarify something: I refer to Hindi films/movies throughout—Meena Kumari pre-dates Bollywood, a term I use only because it is a shorthand for a certain kind of film. I don’t like the term, any more than I like Nollywood (Nigerian films) or Tollywood (Tamil films). It trivializes the fact that these industries are specific to their culture; they are not just clones of Hollywood.

Rant over, let’s get back to the book. Meena Kumari was born Mahjabeen Bano in 1933 to an actor-musician father and a dancer mother and was one of three daughters. Both parents suffered from ill-health, so they pushed their young daughters into acting. Meena Kumari once said that she had started taking care of her family since she was four. Even as a child, she loved the camera and eventually became a huge star, with all the ups and downs that stardom brings. Her marriage to Kamal Amrohi, a director and a screenwriter much older than her, was an intense romance to start with, but soured in a few years. She had started drinking and eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Amrohi wrote his masterpiece, Pakeezah, for her. It was of the few films he directed, and she finished it before she died. The story of a courtesan, Sahebjan, it is among the few Hindi films that does not portray courtesans merely as entertainers but as women with hopes and dreams of their own. The film had been in gestation for years. Amrohi came up with the idea in 1958, wrote the script by 1960, but the film didn’t reach cinemas until 1972. This was partly due to Amrohi’s perfectionism, Meena Kumari’s lack of availability and the state of their relationship. It was Meena Kumari’s and Amrohi’s greatest film and her swansong. The language is sheer poetry, as are lyrics of the songs. And Meena Kumari is wonderful as Sahebjan.

What I enjoyed in this biography is that Mehta looks for the person behind the myth of the “great tragedienne”—the unfortunate woman who was used by everyone, especially men, a myth that Mehta does not entirely buy. Meena Kumari could be difficult and self-destructive, but she was also a generous, intelligent, literate woman (mostly self-taught—she wrote Urdu poetry), who not only knew the names of all the crew on a film set, including the man who served tea, but remembered the details of their personal lives. There is a wonderful story about a journalist arriving on a set to interview her. She was one of the biggest stars in Bombay at the time. He couldn’t find her and was directed to where some of the crew were sitting on the floor, drinking tea, and there she was on the floor among them. I know the next time I watch Pakeezah, I’ll be looking at Meena Kumari in a different light.

Terra Australis: Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia—Matthew Flinders, ed. Tim Flannery

20 Sunday Aug 2017

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I first heard of Matthew Flinders in July 2014 when a friend, Heather Wicks, told me that she was going to London for the unveiling of his statue. Flinders was her fourth great-uncle, who had been the first European to sail around Australia. That piqued my curiosity, so she lent me this book.

Matthew Flinders spent most of his life sailing around Australia, and gave it its name. He was the first to circumnavigate Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land. Flinders spent several years in Australia, finally returning home to his wife, Anne in 1810 after being imprisoned in Mauritius for over six years. (A letter to her is included at the end of this book.) He spent three years writing his diaries but died before he could see them in print. Tim Flannery has edited his diaries into a single volume and written an excellent introduction.

Flinders was born in England in 1774. He decided as a boy that he was going to sea, and by 1789, he was working for the British navy. His first voyage to Australia was in 1794, when he signed up to go on the Reliance to Botany Bay. The crew included a surgeon, George Bass, and the two men shared “an ardour for discovery”. Once the ship had docked in Port Jackson in Australia, they set off to explore the coastline in an 8-foot ship called Tom Thumb. The entire crew comprised the two men and a boy. Over the years, the ships Flinders used to explore the coastline grew bigger in size until he was put in charge of Lady Nelson, a brig of 60 tons in May 1802, an indication of Britain’s growing interest in exploring the continent.

Australia became Flinders’s passion. A few months after the Reliance had docked in London, Flinders was on another ship, the Investigator, heading back to Australia. It was on this second trip, when Flinders was circumnavigating Tasmania, that he encountered the man who was to be his rival, the French captain Nicolas Baudin. The two men—and two countries—vied with each other to discover more about the continent. As the French first lieutenant jokes to Flinders, “If we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies in Van Dieman’s Land, you would not have discovered the south coast before us.”

But of course, the land was not “discovered” by the Europeans—the aborigines had been there for a long, long time before. Flinders writes about his meetings with the aborigines, which were, on the whole, friendly. He tries to see through their eyes and imagines how he would react to strangers, “so different in complexion and appearance”. However, not all these encounters went so well. In 1802, a misunderstanding led to a scuffle between the crew and the aborigines, leading to an aborigine being shot—unfortunately, not the last time this happened.

Flinders writes in great detail about the trips, describing the land, its flora and fauna. He lists the supplies they carried and how much they cost. This book is not a quick read but it really gives a sense of what it must have been like to be on those journeys. We live in a time when it feels like we have seen everything, either actually or virtually. These diaries recapture the sense of wonder of seeing something for the first time. They are also an important chapter in the history of Australia.

Deep South: Paul Theroux

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

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Like Paul Theroux, travellers often go in search of adventure in other countries before exploring their own. Having travelled to remote corners throughout the world, he sets out to discover a part of his own country—the United States—that he knows mostly through its fiction.

The Deep South of the US is a cultural subregion and comprises the southeast corner of the country, the states that were dependent on plantations and slavery during the pre–Civil War period. History is alive and well there. As someone points out, the past “isn’t even past”. Some of the African-Americans Theroux meets remember their grandparents talking about slavery. So it’s not far away, after all. And although things have changed, racism does rear its ugly head.

Theroux decides to avoid the cities and stick to the rural areas to get a better sense of the real Deep South. He goes to small towns and settlements so tiny that they do not exist on the map (“you gotta be going there to get there”). Because the South is a three-day drive from his home in Connecticut, he is able to return time and again. The trip keeps looping in on itself, which means that he has more time to understand the area and see how it has changed.

The shocking fact that comes through is the level of poverty, and this in a so-called rich country. He drives through areas of stunning natural beauty dotted with towns abandoned or barely getting by. He finds “bank deserts”—areas where there were no banks, so people could not get loans or open bank accounts, something Theroux had not seen, not even in the remotest parts of Asia. And when there was a bank, the poor felt too intimated to go in. A lot of the destitution has to do with manufacturing moving out of the US, putting people out of jobs. There does not seem to have been much effort put into creating alternative jobs for them, so they end up sinking below the poverty line.

Theroux meets a wide variety of people, the desperately poor, intellectuals and farmers, who tell him about how difficult it is for black farmers to get loans. But there is incredible resilience, and those who can try to help their fellow citizens—buying bankrupt banks and restoring them for the poor; and helping with housing and food. And all this without much help from the state. And through the portraits of these people, you get a real sense of the place. Theroux has obviously fallen in love with the warmth, hospitality and strength of its people, so it’s no surprise that he chooses to go back.

The Professor and the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary—Simon Winchester

16 Sunday Jul 2017

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Dictionary: A book which explains usually in alphabetic order, the words of a language, giving for each word its typical spelling, an explanation of its meaning or meanings, and often other information, such as pronunciation, etymology, synonyms and illustrative examples.

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the most thorough compendiums of the English language. As someone who loves language, I enjoy browsing the entries, tracing the usage of a word from its coinage to the present. Like all dictionaries, it is a resource that we tend to take for granted and don’t really think about how it was first put together. Simon Winchester tells the story of the creation of the OED, and it is stranger than any fiction.

The OED took 70 years to compile, and at the heart of it were two men: James Murray, the editor for 40 years, and Dr. W.C. Minor, one of the dictionary’s most prolific—and reliable—voluntary contributors with over 10,000 entries.

Over the 20 years that they corresponded, Murray often invited Minor to visit the offices of the OED, but Minor refused to leave his home in Crowthorne. Finally, with the dictionary almost half-completed, Murray decided to pay Minor a visit to thank him for his help and to make sure his work was recognized. He telegraphed ahead to announce his visit and was met at the station by a coach with a liveried coachman. He was driven to a forbidding red-brick mansion and ushered into a library, where an important-looking gentleman was waiting. Murray greeted the man as W.C. Minor but the man corrected him. “I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years.”

W.C. Minor was a surgeon in the army, who was arrested for shooting and killing a man. He came from an old and highly respected family in Connecticut and had a history of mental illness. John Murray, on the other hand, was the son of a tailor in the Scottish borders and a formidable scholar. Together, these two men laid the foundations of what was to become the greatest dictionary of the English language.

Winchester was given rare access to the files on W.C. Minor. The book is scattered with definitions from the OED, and book feels almost Victorian, both in the writing and the black and white illustrations. There are some wonderful touches, for example the description of Minor working. For him, contributing to the dictionary was almost a therapy, a way of holding on to his sanity. He would pick a book from his collection, and then index any word that he found interesting. You can imagine Minor working hard, oblivious to the spyhole to his cell opening and closing as the guards checked up on him, filling his prison desk with “quires of paper, containing a master list of indexed words”.

But it’s not just the two men who are central to this story—the dictionary is almost a character in its own right, with its “twelve tombstone-sized volumes”. Winchester goes into detail about what it took to put together the OED—the planning and the meticulous work. The Professor and the Madman is a fascinating story and one that’s well worth reading.

 

Some histories can never be reconciled

22 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in Fiction, Non-Fiction

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Strange fruit–the title of a song by Billie Holliday that’s been playing on my car stereo, and I can’t get it out of my mind…nor can I get the images it evokes out of my head.

It kept playing in my head as I read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Underground Railroad (Random House, 2016), the story of Cora, who travels from bondage to an elusive freedom along that legendary trail taken by so many desperately hopeful slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Like her mother before her, Cora flees the brutality of a cotton plantation in Georgia to embarks on an arduous journey through the states of a loose federation. Her escape is doubly complicated when she causes the death of a white pursuer, marking her as a wanted woman—an escaped slave and a murderer.

Cora’s first stop is South Carolina, where she encounters learning and a short-lived taste of independence before the ruthless slave-catcher Ridgeway shows up and she needs to flee once again. The secret network of safe houses and pathways takes her next to North Carolina, where she lives for months ferreted away in the tiny attic of a reluctant savior couple until Ridgeway discovers her and drags her away, even as an angry crowd calls for the public lynching of the couple. Cora manages to escape once again with the help of a freeman in Ohio, but Ridgeway’s shadow does not quite leave her path, catching up with her years later, making real freedom forever elusive, forever illusory.

The Underground Railroad is not an easy read, but it is riveting. Cora’s story—a possible fiction—is interspersed with the traces of other stories, of other escapes, told through handbills and posters of the day, revealing in their matter of factness.  For every African slave that reached the north, hundreds were caught, punished in horrible ways, and lynched, their bodies becoming the strange fruit that Cora encountered along the roads in North Carolina and Virginia.

Some stories can never have real closure.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that I moved on to another book that opened for me another chapter in the history of the United States: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Random House, 2016). Based on painstaking documentary research and scores of in-depth interviews, this work of narrative non-fiction tells the story of a series of mysterious deaths of Osage tribespeople in the oil rich lands of Oklahoma in the early part of the twentieth century. Tying together the various threads of an incredibly complex story, beginning with the death of a young Osage woman who failed to return home after a party at her sister’s, through the persistence of a Texas ranger-turned FBI agent, to the early years of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Grann uncovers something that is part conspiracy, part opportunism, but complete tragedy.

The Osage were among the many tribes that were driven westward by the expanding needs of a growing (white) nation and like other Native American peoples, were handed a parcel of land to compensate for what they had lost. The Osage were given a large tract of rocky, inhospitable land in Oklahoma, but soon the area was found to be extremely rich in oil, and greedy prospectors and businessmen converged on the tribe to purchase drilling rights. The Osage grew wealthy but federal laws restricted access to their own money, and in most cases every tribes person was assigned a white guardian who managed their assets. Grann describes the systematic plunder of the Osage’s wealth—through cheating, duping gullible wards, and in many cases, murder that led to the property being acquired by a guardian.

While The Underground Railroad is fiction that forces us to confront the facts of history, Killers of the Flower Moon uses narrative to draw us into a story that could so easily be forgotten. Together, they remind us of the original sin(s) upon which the American nation is constructed—genocide and slavery.  The purpose of such stories—fiction or reality—is not to build rancor or stoke resentment, but to nurture compassion and empathy, and maybe, to force us to be vigilant and “woke”.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—Stephen King

01 Monday May 2017

Posted by in About reading, writing and books, Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction

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This book on writing starts with two contradictory epigraphs: “Honesty is the best policy” and “Liars prosper”. Good fiction is a mix of the two. Writers invent, but also draw upon what they know.

This book is far more than a primer on writing well. Stephen King starts and ends the book with a series of vignettes from his life. He describes his memories as a “fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you”. You follow him from his childhood as a budding writer all the way to his huge success, his marriage, his battle with alcohol and drugs, and going clean. All of this made him the writer he is. Sometimes his books give a a glimpse into what he was going through when he wrote them: for example, Jack, the main character in The Shining is an alcoholic writer.

In the last section, he writes about a terrible accident he had halfway through writing this book. He was hit by van and almost died. Recovery was slow and painful and finishing the book helped him through it.

King leads into the “how to” part of the book with a piece about his grandfather’s toolbox: a large handmade wooden box, with three levels and a silk lining of “pinkish-red cabbage roses fading into a smog of grease and dirt”. King says that a writer needs to have a similar toolbox, with the first level containing the “common tools”: grammar and vocabulary: “as the whore said to the bashful sailor, ‘It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it’”.

He makes two points: one is that “good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals”; and the second that with hard work, dedication and timely help, it is possible to make a good writer out of a competent one. The hard work is critical—there are no shortcuts. And if you want to be a writer, you must read voraciously.

There is a lot more good advice here, which I won’t go into. I like King’s style—he addresses the reader throughout, and feels strongly about most things. He hates adverbs and the passive tense with a passion (and people who say “That’s so cool!”). I loved his passion about his craft, although I didn’t always agree with him.

At the end of the book—normally the annexes, but here referred to as “And Furthermore”—King shares a first draft of his writing and the edited version. As an editor, I found this fascinating. He also shares a list of must-read books. An interesting list, but with a handful of exceptions, it lists mostly Anglophone writers from the West.

If you want to write, I suggest you read this book. Once you have mastered the fundamentals and figured out your genre and style, you need to throw in some stardust. King’s earliest memory is “of imagining I was someone else”. Most children do this, or have an imaginary friend (I did). We start out with the wonderful ability to imagine and create our own worlds, but sooner or later, many of us allow life to knock it out of us. Being creative is keeping that ability and wonder alive. As King says, “We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style. . . but…you’d do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.”

Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Media / Film / Music, Non-Fiction

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born-to-run-9781501141515_hrIt was in the early 80s that I first heard Bruce Springsteen. Looking for new music, I raided the tiny music shop in Secunderabad (India) and picked up Born to Run. I was hooked. The music spoke to me, although I was from a different culture and a different continent—it was the feeling deep down inside of needing to be on the move (and I thought Thunder Road was one of the best love songs I’d heard). I’ve been a fan of his music ever since.

So I was excited, but a little nervous, when this book came out. Did I really want to get to know someone I admired? Maybe there is something to be said about keeping a distance.

He didn’t disappoint. The book is funny and poignant and above all, honest. You do get to know Springsteen better, warts and all. He doesn’t gloss over the problems he had getting close to people, his depression and his single-minded ambition. Although the writing can be lyrical, it is not polished—he tends to throw around ellipses and words in capital letters (which can be a bit disconcerting) and strings of adjectives. But this makes his story feel immediate. You can really feel what it must have been like to be young and full of music—and hormones! And it’s a distinct style, which I liked, rather than a bland recounting of events that you sometimes find in autobiographies. His passion for music, and for making music, shines throughout the book.

Springsteen grew up in New Jersey, son of an exuberant Italian mother and a misanthropic Irish father (with some Dutch heritage, which explains the surname). The father’s frustration and anger would come out when he’d been drinking and would often erupt on his son for not being tough enough. Looking back, Springsteen is able to see his father more clearly: “beyond his rage, he harboured a gentleness, timidity, shyness and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I harboured on the outside and the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled him.”

Springsteen knew quite early that the only thing he could do with his life was make music. He started out with rock—one of his early bands was Steel Mill that played “primal rock” with long guitar solos. Inspired by Bob Dylan and wanting to write about his experience and the world he lived in, he started working on songs that became his first album, Greetings from Ashbury Park. That was the beginning of the long road for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. They have played together for almost 40 years. I saw them in Bern in 2009, their last tour with the charismatic saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, to whom Springsteen dedicates a chapter. Of Clemon’s death in 2011, Springsteen says “losing him was like losing the rain”.

Springsteen dealt with the emotional scars left by his father by never allowing anyone to get really close and staying constantly on the move. But you can’t run from yourself, and it was only a matter of time before depression caught up with him, “spewing like an oil spill over the beautiful turquoise green gulf of my carefully planned existence”. He got through it, mostly, with help from his wife Patti Scialfa and his manager Jon Landau. But through it all—through the depression, the fame and the wealth—he’s never lost touch with reality.

His songs are often about ordinary people trying to get by. He captured 9/11 in The Rising, and the financial meltdown of the late 2000s in Wrecking Ball. I enjoyed the time I spent in his company, and hope he carries on doing what he has been doing all these years: reminding us that the “other” isn’t really all that different from us. And in this fraught time, when societies are so divided, this message is more important than ever.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster—Svetlana Alexievich

12 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Books in translation, Current Affairs / Politics / Society, Non-Fiction, The reading challenge

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voices-from-chernobyl“Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.”

On 26 April 1986, Energy Block No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was destroyed by a series of explosions. This was one of the biggest technological disasters of the twentieth century, and no one was prepared for it. Soviet officials—under enormous political pressure from from those at the top who worried about how the country would be perceived after this—tended to err on the side of caution. (More information on the reaction.)

Ten years after the explosions, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and author, began talking to the survivors, including residents of the area and those who came to clean up. Their testimonies form this book. Alexievich stands back and lets the people speak. And an oral history of the disaster emerges from the monologues of those whose voices had not yet been heard.

While it did not even have a nuclear reactor on its soil, Belarus has been the most affected by Chernobyl. It lost 485 of its villages and settlements. Of a total of 10 million people, some 2.1 million—or one in five, of whom 700,000 are children—now live on contaminated land. In the two regions that are closest to Chernobyl, mortality rates are 20 percent higher than birth rates.

Through these individual stories, the author builds up an overall picture of what really happened, both during the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath. What comes through is a suffering that is unimaginable and an unthinkable negligence on the part of the authorities.

Many of the interviewees spoke of the beauty of Chernobyl’s landscape—and its stillness. As if even the birds knew something terrible had happened, and left. But radiation is an invisible and lethal enemy. Farmers living off the land could not understand why they had to milk their cows and then throw the milk away. Or why they could not eat the carrots and cucumbers they grew. Although the liquidators—civil and military staff who cleaned up—were asked to dig up the topsoil and bury it deep in the earth, keeping it away from the water table, this did not always happen in practice.

An interviewee spoke of the liquidators who helped clear up the roof of the reactor. The lead vests they wore were of no use as the radiation came from below them. The only “protection” they had for their feet were cheap imitation-leather boots. The liquidators would spend a minute and a half to two minutes a day frantically cleaning up the debris, and then would be let go with a hundred roubles and a certificate. “And then they disappeared into the vast peripheries of our motherland….They were young guys. They’re dying now, but they understand that if it wasn’t for them…These are people who came from a certain culture, the culture of the great achievement. They were a sacrifice.”

The unquestioning faith of citizens in their state and their duty is striking. Those who were called upon to go to Chernobyl went without protest. People in the exclusion zone were not too concerned, initially. After all, if the situation was really so serious, would the authorities not have informed them? However, their faith did not survive Chernobyl.

This book is not for the squeamish. On a physical level, there are graphic descriptions of what radiation can do to humans. Every pregnancy was a nightmare. There is a telling remark made by a midwife: “It was a long time since I had seen a happy pregnant woman”. Many women opted for abortions. Children who were carried to term were born deformed.

On an emotional level, the stories are heartbreaking. Lyudmilla, for example, was married to a fireman who was part of the clean-up operation and was dying of radiation sickness. Through it all, she nursed him, refusing to leave his side, trying to protect him as best she could. “And they photographed him. For science, they said. I’d have pushed them all out of there!…How dare they? It’s all mine—it’s my love.” Those who moved to another part of the country were stigmatized.

Listening to these stories—and it really does feel like you’re listening to them—is overwhelming. There were times when I felt numb because of the sheer volume of detail, told and retold. The author’s writing reflects the people as they speak, flat and repetitive at times, lyrical at others. Alexiviech has found a way to bring the disaster to life simply by listening to ordinary people who have seen it first-hand.

A photographer, Viktor Latun, captured the events in Chernobyl in the days after the disaster. He is quoted as saying: “We don’t live on this earth, but in our dreams, in our conversations. Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it. Even when you’re near death.”

In 2015, Svetlana Alexiviech was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. And I can see why. The voices she records in her book stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

My Father’s Zoo: Esther David

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction

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Review by Sadhana Ramchander

How many people you know grew up in a zoo? How many people you know have a father who started a zoo? This is the stuff of my own childhood dreams (before zoos became bad places), and I became very excited when I saw this book at the Hyderabad Literary Festival 2016. I bought the book, met Esther David who had come for one of the sessions, and told her how fascinated I was by the idea of the book!

I really enjoyed reading this small book. Esther David’s father Reuben David (1912-1989) set up the Hill Garden Zoo in Ahmedabad, which later became the Kamala Nehru Zoological Garden. A veterinary doctor, Reuben grew up with animals and had a way with them that surprised and amazed people. He opened a a clinic for dogs, and was working there when the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation decided to make a zoo around Kankaria Lake, and invited him to set it up.

‘My father’s zoo’ is about how the making of this zoo, and how it slowly filled up with animals and birds – flamingoes, bearcats, orangutans, brown bears, anteaters, tigers, lions and many others. There are interesting stories and incidents about each animal that was brought in. Hallagulla – the angry langur, Shikha, the homesick sarus crane, Vanraj and Vanrani – the rescued lion cubs that survived because of Blackie the dog who fed them along with her pups, about Parvati, the three-horned, six-legged bullock that was bought off from a sadhu who was exploiting it, and so on.

Writes Esther, “It was amazing to see father playing with a full-grown lion as if a lion was his pet dog. I often saw father in Montu’s cage as it was the laboratory for his experiments in co-existence. He had Montu from the time he was a cub and had introduced him to other animals. So Montu lived with two dogs, a tiger and a stump-tailed Macaque. They lived in total harmony but later, the tiger Raju was given another cage as Montu and he not only had ego problems, but were always in competition for father’s attention. So instead of Raju, an Alsatian was introduced into Montu’s cage”.

Illustrated in black and white by Esther, this tribute to her father makes delightful reading for children and animal lovers.